Mairian wrote:
> When you say its to do with what people have been equipped to perceive, I
> suppose we could look at the term 'equipped' in two ways, both of which
> have discursive dimensions. One is historicity i.e where we come from and
> how we get there,
I'm worried that this suggests a type of teleology or progress. The present
may be as strange as the past it's just that we don't see it that way. The
episteme of today may be totally contingent and totally unconnected to one
that may appear in the future or has appearred in the past. Yes there may be
links but there are also breaks. That's why Foucault said that one day
people may look back and ask 'what was madness'? I think the discursive
formations around particular objects like disability are probably very clear
and readable in the present. The benefit of looking at the past is to show
that it doesn't have to be this way or that, there is contingency. 'How
things are' could be different.
and the other is literally the different 'equipment' that
> people with different impairments possess and how this impacts upon
> perception and knowledge construction among other things.
As subject-objects, people with impairments will of course be equipped in
certain ways as are all human beings, and will also, according to Focuault,
be active in producing themselves, but this will also take place within
discourse. We produce ourselves within discourse and as subjects provide the
bodies on and through which discourse may act.
The latter can,
> for want of a better way of putting it, tell the other to go to hell. That
> is, the experience of blindness, for example, puts paid to the myth of
> visualism and its input into how we decide what is 'real'. At the same
time
> the corollary is that deafness may reinforce the *experience* of visualism
> so that the visual is *always* real. That is why I felt that some
> impairments were very important in examining what we call 'material
> reality', and not because I happen to be deaf myself.
>
This is a very interesting point and one I haven't thought about. Perhaps
having such an 'impairment' gives someone a different relationship with the
sayable and visible.
Regards,
Adam
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